[dbalatero]

I could be wrong, but it feels like one issue is that AI seems to cater more as a signal to venture capital and the internals of the tech industry in a lot of these products, while consumers just want to know "what is this product going to actually do for me," and care less about whether it is implemented with the buzzword du jour.

[torben-friis]

>while consumers just want to know "what is this product going to actually do for me," and care less about whether it is implemented with the buzzword du jour.

I would say that undersells the (not neutral, actively negative) impact of AI to many.

What many people hear is "made with the tech that plagiarizes, leaves artists (and soon you as well) without a job, and makes things generic and bland!"

You might as well market it as "created by child labor".

[smcl]

Another signal that prominent mentions of "AI" in your marketing sends is "this product is going to shoe-horn AI into this somehow". Plenty of products that people use every day at home or in work - Google search, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Jira, and more - have had some kind of AI-first redesign. In each case some AI functionality has been placed prominently either somewhere that you accidentally press it or in place of something that previously worked. Even my iPhone brings up this brightly coloured keyboard expecting me to do something with AI, and I don't actually know what causes it.

So I think it's much simpler than solidarity with creators, artists or even workers more generally. It's that "AI" as a brand stinks, people are connecting it with annoying, low quality experiences and shitty low-effort art.

[Angostura]

I think AI has also become synonymous with slapdash, low effort, probably steals my data

[FeteCommuniste]

Precisely. "We're doing this with AI" reads as "we don't care enough about this to pay a person to do it."

[doom2]

And why shouldn't it? There are so many prominent examples of badly implemented AI solutions. It's like how China is associated with cheap copycat products even though they are perfectly capable (and do!) produce many well made, quality things.

[stvltvs]

And frustrating automated voice systems, support chat bots that go in circles, etc.

[dmd]

>> It looks like this isn't something I can help you with. Would you like to be connected to a human who can help?

> Sure!

>> Ok, I'm connecting you to a human now.

[5 minutes later]

> Hello?

>> Hi! What can I help you with?

> Are you a human?

>> No, I'm an AI agent programmed to help you with anything you need. What can I do for you?

> You said you were going to connect me to a human.

>> That isn't something I can do. What can I help you with?

Turns out "connecting to a human" is something it knows about in its training data so it'll hallucinate doing so.

[dylan604]

At least your example IDs itself as an AI agent. The ones I've come across hide it but it becomes obvious with responses like "I don't have access to that information" or something a human would never say. I had a dealership give me one of those, so I hung up on it and called a different dealership where I was connected to an actual human. Guess which one got my business...

[dv_dt]

So AI is resurrecting the microsoft clippy problem

[dylan604]

Clippy was just ahead of its time. Sadly for the bots of now, they are only slightly better than Clippy

[bigtex]

Example #1, Co-pilot in EVERY corner of Microsoft's software.

[fluoridation]

>In each case some AI functionality has been placed prominently either somewhere that you accidentally press it or in place of something that previously worked.

Just the other day I was trying to fix someone's laptop and reflexively pressed (what I thought was) the context menu key, only to find no context menu opened, and instead a Copilot window right in the middle of the screen.

[queenkjuul]

> Plenty of products that people use every day at home or in work - Google search, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Jira, and more

Most egregiously: VSCode.

No, i absolutely never in my life will want Copilot to summarize anything for me and yet guess what button appeared in the UI and i accidentally clicked on last night....

[nativeit]

VSCodium was better on this front last time I tried it, and since Microsoft seems intent on allowing the Extensions to be a wildly insecure free-for-all, I am seeing fewer and fewer reasons to stick with the official version.

[jordanb]

I'm pissed off that Android took over the power button to activate their AI agent bullshit.

[stvltvs]

Search your settings for Power Button, Side Button, or whatever. You should be able to change the setting for a long press.

[owebmaster]

Changing it back doesn't change the fact that it was changed for AI-maxxing

[nathan_compton]

I've recently switched to grapheneos. I have a high tolerance for shit not working, but its been fine.

[DANmode]

Google, not Android.

I assure you, the Android Open Source Project made no such change.

[WorldMaker]

Feeling rather flippant, but what's the difference in practice? Can you point to an AOSP "brand" phone on a store shelf that is "de-Googled" out of the box?

What is AOSP really for other than "open source washing" Google's ecosystem? Is it ever making standards that Google has to follow/comply with or is it always just the tail being wagged by the dog to make it look like the dog is happy about open source (but still isn't majority open source)?

[DANmode]

LineageOS, GrapheneOS et al base themselves upon this upstream project.

A good one to familiarize yourself with, and support.

[MyHonestOpinon]

My washing machine also has this AI icon. Not a big deal but it makes me roll my eyes everytime I see it.

[gilleain]

That's actually a feature that washing machines have had for a while - "generative washing" - it is where the extra odd socks come from.

[jraph]

> extra odd socks

I have the opposite issue, can generative washing recover the lost odd socks somehow?

[JesseTG]

Common misconception, the socks you think you're losing are being found by other people's washers.

[rbonvall]

Socks are not getting lost; they are getting compacted to keep the context window small.

[Angostura]

My LG one has had smomething like that - a coupkle of years old. Seems quite nifty though - it tumbles the load dry for a while and alledgely uses the patterm of weight shift to determine what kind of load it is - the materials etc - and adjusts the wash accordingly

[dominotw]

i blame microslop for poisoning public perception with copilot. god that was so awful.

[jordanb]

Also the product itself is likely to suck.

One thing that the tech world has become obsessed with is increasingly non-deterministic products. Products that do what they think what the user wants to do rather than what they actually want to do. They've also fallen in love with changing things for the sake of change.

I had a friend buy a Tesla and one thing that ruined the car for him is that the menu would change overnight. He'd know how to turn the fog lights on, for instance, but next time he had to do it, the menu had moved someplace else.

AI is the ultimate non-deterministic product. You can ask it to do the same thing repeatedly and get different results every time!

This is one hell that the cyberpunk people didn't anticipate. If you watch cyberpunk movies from the 80s or 90s the tech all works kinda like how a microwave or vcr would of worked back then: the device had discrete controls and it did one thing reliably. The closest vision back then to what we're getting now is the moody ship's computer from hitchhiker's guide.

[noirscape]

> The closest vision back then to what we're getting now is the moody ship's computer from hitchhiker's guide.

It's not the ship computer, but the door AIs, which had this marketing blurb in the brochure:

> All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.

Tellingly, the main characters respond with annoyance whenrver the doors speak up.

Hitchhikers Guide should not have been as prophetic as it ended up being, but here we are.

[mrguyorama]

It's somewhat fascinating to me that we are so far out in the weeds of stupidity in the modern era that the only things that were predicted accurately have to come from satire about "Nobody would ever be so stupid as to build or create this"

[yardie]

It drives me crazy that after every update the menu icons, like the browser, is in a completely different arbitrary place. And since Tesla doesn't want to allow Carplay I'm forced to use the slightly less than useful mobile web version of my favourite apps.

[frollogaston]

The touchscreen is the only thing that's kept me from leasing a Tesla the past 8 years.

[queenkjuul]

And now it's one of two things keeping me from ever doing so in the future

[kjkjadksj]

Not the hitler salute?

[frollogaston]

Correct

[autoexec]

"Nazis are fine, but touchscreens aren't" seems like a weird place to draw the line, but I guess it's good that you have one at all.

[bigstrat2003]

> I had a friend buy a Tesla and one thing that ruined the car for him is that the menu would change overnight. He'd know how to turn the fog lights on, for instance, but next time he had to do it, the menu had moved someplace else.

Incidentally, this is why I will never buy a Tesla. I used to want one pretty badly, I thought (and still think tbh) that they are very cool cars. I was even willing to barely tolerate using a touchscreen as the only interface. But to make that work safely, the controls need to be in the same exact place every time so that I can learn to manipulate them without looking at the screen. Moving stuff around willy nilly like Tesla does isn't just annoying, it's actively unsafe. So I'm not buying one and never will, because they have proved I can't trust them to act right.

[dabinat]

It used to be worse: at one point Tesla made the controls for the AC intensity a slider. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried moving your finger in a perfect straight line in a moving vehicle without looking, but I’m pretty sure it’s impossible.

[vanuatu]

can you blame them? nondeterministic products have resulted in some of the most successful businesses of All Time (tiktok, reels, google search, product recommendations)

[ExtremisAndy]

I think you may be right. I enjoy tech and programming, but hardly any of my friends/family do. And nearly everyone in my inner circle (an admittedly small number of people, considering I'm an extreme introvert) condemns and avoids AI both for the reasons you mentioned and because they refuse to "outsource my brain to AI!"

In fact, the only time I personally encounter a lot of pro-AI commentary is when I come here to HN (and, obviously, there are plenty of anti-AI people on this site too).

I personally appreciate it and use it, but I'm still "old-fashioned" in the sense that I only ask it for very specific things and always read through what it produces. I'm honestly not entirely sure how I'm supposed to feel about all this. These are interesting times, to say the least.

[afavour]

I wouldn’t over index in the artist side of things. A lot of people don’t really think about that at all, just look at how readily Spotify was adopted despite taking a ton of money away from artists.

But “AI is coming for your job” is very resonant.

[Twirrim]

Kids of varying ages that I've spoken to often talk about the environmental impact (mind you, I live in a fairly liberal/left leaning part of the country), among other things.

At the risk of over generalising, I mostly hear a lot of shit talk from younger generations, distrust from millennials, and more excitement and interest from Gen-x-ish and older.

As with many things, there's a certain level of hypocrisy to the shit talking, because teachers are at the schools are complaining to parents about the kid's use of AI, and pointing out that they will automatically fail any writing that seems to be using AI.

[TheOtherHobbes]

AI has been a culturally radioactive PR disaster of truly epic proportions. Aside from whether or not it works, there are so many established catastrophically negative talking points - steals from creators, destroys the environment, is coming for your job - I'm not sure its reputation can be recovered.

[thatguy0900]

Does it's reputation even matter? Everyone with money is pushing it, heavily. The government is even stepping in to stop any kind of punishment when it's factually shown that they are stealing water. The people will learn to tolerate it whether they like it or not, eventually.

[TheOtherHobbes]

The data center roll-out is weird, and far beyond anything that can be justified rationally. But this administration is aggressively pro-grift and anti-reality, so I would suspect that's as likely to be about some kind of corruption/grift/Ponzi as about real capability.

I try to distinguish between the actual tech, which spans light and dark, and the financial and economic engineering around it, which is definitely a darker shade of black.

[diegolas]

if the internet did AI will as well. after all the internet was (and is) full of scams and p*dos, yet people use it the whole day, for everything.

[Aurornis]

> how readily Spotify was adopted despite taking a ton of money away from artists

Spotify was praised as an alternative to piracy that gave some money to artists at a price that consumers wouldn’t complain too much about.

You don’t have to look at Spotify, though. Look at all of the people who won’t even pay Spotify or Netflix rates for content because they know they can pay $0 to pirate it.

[dh2022]

Sorry my friend, but Netflix is not a good product. It has a limited selection and, at least for my account, a lot of commercial ads. I am not pirating but I calculated that if I were to pirate I would spend less time downloading the movie than the cumulative time spent watching commercials on Netflix.

bTW - I stopped watching Netflix.

[Aurornis]

Netflix was just an example.

> I calculated that if I were to pirate I would spend less time downloading the movie than the cumulative time spent watching commercials on Netflix.

I don’t know what plan you were on, but mine doesn’t have ads.

This kind of proves my point, though: People don’t want to pay for things (including the ad-free level) so they use it to justify piracy as being superior for various reasons.

[dh2022]

The selection is still shitty though, even with no ads. Piracy is a superior choice.

[red-iron-pine]

spotify still pays artists. it's just a shitty deal.

most big ai will never compensate anyone

[happymellon]

Is it really much different to how much artists got from radio?

Most artists never got radio money because it went into a label slush fund and was spent retaining the tent pole artists.

[jasonlotito]

The big difference was radio wasn't on-demand. You couldn't just listen to a complete album. If you wanted to listen to your favorite artist, you couldn't do that on the radio without listening to a lot of other stuff.

[happymellon]

Most artists didn't make money from album sales.

They received some money up front in a contract to record the album, and the label make the money from sales.

There is a reason the bands toured and sold teeshirts.

[mukbangpervert]

The overall economics are wildly different.

Radio didn't pay much, but it was promotion for the album.

Spotify doesn't pay much, and it _replaces_ the album.

[happymellon]

CD sales didn't pay much, because it all went to the labels.

[inigyou]

Spotify pays artists the smallest amount they can possibly get away with without getting sued. Which is a tiny amount. Spotify is owned by music industry giants who needed a new money-grabbing scheme when the older schemes of the 70s-90s failed in the internet era.

[afavour]

For a lot of artists they’re paid a rounding error. The core question is whether they’re paid enough to make a living from and the answer is no.

[AlienRobot]

I think that undersells the real problem.

In many cases "AI" signals some sort of betrayal to users, because it shows that the developer CAN drastically change the GUI to implement features it wants to implement, except in practice "AI" isn't a feature that provides tangible benefits to the user.

So you get the feeling of "you could have done this this WHOLE time?" + the fact they didn't do it for you but just to say they are using AI now.

If the developer wanted to please the users, they would instead implement features that users have been demanding for a while. That got a lower priority so that AI that nobody asked for could be implemented.

[kenjackson]

I actually don’t think most consumers care about that at all. Consumers loved Napster. They have no problem stealing from artists outright, let alone indirectly.

I think to consumers AI denotes lack of accountability or oversight. They think it might work - but it might not and no one will care.

For example, I’m doing work in standardized test prep and there are tons of new AI products and no one likes it. Consumers feel as if they will get subtle but important things wrong. Most of these companies are now trying to hide that they are using AI generated questions.

[TRiG_Ireland]

There was a lot of outrage over the use of AI-generated images on the Leaving Cert exam in Ireland recently.

[egsgsgst]

outrage lol

[ozim]

Hard to agree.

No one cares about plagiarism and artists.

I bet lots of people would even be happy that artists get smacked because they see only high profile and rich artists.

Normal people don’t care about AI and are not afraid that it will take their jobs.

They are pissed off because of they are paying customers they expect some level of respect.

AI bots are slap in the face, they ask basic stuff that human operator should infer from the conversation. But you are hit with a dummy that doesn’t solve any of your issues and have to spend time explaining yourself.

Funny part is that’s exactly the same as low income lvl 1 support.

But there is no comparison study. My idea is people are equally pissed off by lvl 1 support that they have to explain stuff in detail and get no real resolution.

[fluoridation]

Mostly agreed. Practically speaking, phone support reps just follow a flowchart and scripts, so there's effectively no difference between getting an AI or a person (except in those cases where the STT can't make out what you're saying, but that can happen with a person too). But as you've correctly pointed out, it's about respect, and I suspect most people do find it slightly more disrespectful to be forced to talk to an AI instead of another person.

[butlike]

What it also hits on for the average person is the uncanny valley. It just feels bad to talk to something mimicrying a person. It feels like talking to an invader at a deep, survival level.

[Aurornis]

> What many people hear is "made with the tech that plagiarizes, leaves artists (and soon you as well) without a job

My unpopular opinion is that many or maybe most people don’t care about this.

They don’t care about where the content came from or if the artists get paid for the work. If they can get something (an answer to their question, some output that finishes their homework, some writing for a work assignment) more easily and with less cost or effort then they want it that way.

Look at piracy for a similar topic: It’s not even a derivative work, it’s just taking straight from the artists while bypassing their payment ask. Yet even on Hacker News every piracy thread fills up with piracy apologia and people saying artists shouldn’t expect to be paid for their digital output or that IP rights shouldn’t exist. Many people just don’t care about this stuff even when it’s direct source content taken 1:1 without paying. They definitely don’t care if the tool they’re using to do their homework or write that work email was trained on it.

[ricardobayes]

I think there is some nuance between an individual downloading something (and in many countries it is outright legal or at least, alegal) and building billion-dollar companies on it.

[Aurornis]

We’re talking about the consumers, though. They don’t care how the free or cheap thing arrives. They like that they didn’t have to pay as much.

The same argument is used to justify normal piracy: The consumer thinks they’re stealing from the corporation who distributes it, not the artist.

[RiverCrochet]

Downloading artists' songs is not equivalent to people using AI to generate sounds/images and claiming they are an artist. I really don't have a problem with people using AI to generate sounds/images for their own personal enjoyment, but taking what it generates and then telling others that you "made this" or are an artist is deception.

> artists shouldn’t expect to be paid for their digital output

The issue is the notion that an artist gets to control what one does with their personal property that isn't the artist's property. No one is saying artists shouldn't get paid. Artists should get paid but setting up a system that surveils everything I hear and see to enforce it is too much.

> Many people just don’t care about this stuff

I agree with this though I don't follow your tie-in to piracy. Most people do not really care about music, and the industry has known this and delivers most music through ad-supported channels and shapes what music production it can to fit this. The ugly truth is that there's probably a lot of people who wouldn't mind listening to AI radio, it's probably coming, and it will be good enough that a sizeable percentage of the population will enjoy it and not care.

The real art has always been outside of the industry though, and that won't change in the AI age.

[ux266478]

> people using AI to generate sounds/images and claiming they are an artist.

> but taking what it generates and then telling others that you "made this" or are an artist is deception.

I think there's a fundamental problem with this line of argument, which is that it's naive elitism that's been historically leveraged since the 20th century at minimum. "Your music was made on a computer? That's not real music! All you do is push some buttons!" with equivalencies for all mediums of digital art.

There's absolutely a reductionism I think that happens with naysaying generative AI, where it's almost a kind of naive agreement with the VC hypetrain. There's a belief that effective usage of AI is just dumping 20 words into a text input and the maximal quality it's capable of gets spit out 5 seconds later. It's the same variety of reductionism as above where ignorance of how wide the domain is precludes the ability to understand where the skill ceiling is (or what is even involved). The idea that this isn't even the tip of the iceberg nets an expectation that "advanced" AI usage extends to random prompt engineering at most.

Problematically, "AI generated" doesn't really say much about the process, intent, or really much of anything beyond a specific computational architecture being involved at some point of the workflow. It could mean they slapped a tweet-length stream of consciousness into a shitty web prompt, or it could mean constructing a complex pipeline, combining processing steps and multiple models like hotpatching synths, using an intuition built upon thousands of hours of learning their tools, using fine-tuning adaptations that they spent even more time building, and carefully analyzing and responding to the end result. In the former case, I don't think there's much artistry involved and it exclusively produces crap. I think it's a massive disservice to the latter however, to suggest it doesn't involve extensive artistry, or that the paradigm of the tools themselves strip the notion of art away.

I understand wholly why the first case gets primacy, but if we're to philosophize about these tools then I think we have to fully account for the second case.

[saltcured]

I think the backlash is because there are people claiming "I made this!" for what is about as much involvement as pressing the big meal combo touch button on a fast food ordering kiosk.

Ironically, in the arts there are also some patrons who might feel this way when they commissioned some work. With a big enough purchase price, they think their role as a source of funds is creative.

Now with AI, we're speed running this whole experience among people who normally do not have exposure to this broad continuum of contradictory ideas.

[RiverCrochet]

Elitism doesn't logically counter an argument. If you're yearning for the skill that makes you elite, then work to get it. If you want the output of skill without the work, you're fake, and it will show in your output. There's many that don't care and you can make money off of them. The smart will see being on the wrong side of this as being exploited. No one can really stop you from exploiting the un-smart, but everyone can make a decision to not be un-smart.

> "Your music was made on a computer? That's not real music! All you do is push some buttons!"

Non sequitur/red herring. I'll explain with an example.

In the late 80's or early 90's, Emu Systems made a device called the Proteus One. It's basically the guts of a keyboard without the keyboard, you bring your own MIDI keyboard.

It will definitely make sounds if you push buttons (keys) on your attached keyboard. If you compose these sounds, pushing those keys, you're an artist.

The unit has a "Demo Mode" where it will play a stored song. If you push this button, the sound you cause this unit to make is not artistry. Specifically, you're not an artist for having pushed this button.

[ux266478]

Firstly, the premise was about a fallacious delusion of elitism, not about elitism of-itself, which was so trivially inferrable from the context I'm not sure how you missed it. Secondly, yes a premise isn't an argument. You know there's an entire rest of the post beneath all that which you conveniently ignored? That's where the argument actually lives. You regurgitated it while pretending you disagree. You can probably avoid that in the future by actually reading what you're replying to and trying to understand what's being said, rather than firing off a ridiculous strawman reply after reading 2 sentences.

[wouldbecouldbe]

I think its more that AI is generally really badly implemented. It means we get a less qualitative experience, mainly on support, but also writing etc.

[reluctant_dev]

Outside of frontier model providers, the vast majority of "AI" branded products/features just don't feel high quality.

AI generated media (art, music, etc) is very repulsive to interact with and so many products feel like they have led with AI solutions to problems that don't exist.

[zombot]

Agreed, but it still appeals to investors because it promises to concentrate more money and power in the hands of those who own the hardware that runs the LLMs.

[damnesian]

It only takes one attempt to contact a corporation using their new AI system to scar you, it's that dehumanizing.

And millions of people know exactly what I mean.

[kakacik]

Apart form all other comments which are mostly from IT insider perspective, which most mankind simply doesn't have, AI means real rather than potential job loss in future.

I've talked to doctors, drivers, lawyers etc. and most white collar and many blue collar jobs feel the threat. Which, based on various news, feel justified even if not immediate. Even if its not the same llm per se, but the word "AI" is already tarnished as scum backstabbing negative entity, I literally don't know a single person who sees it these days positively.

[autoexec]

> Apart form all other comments which are mostly from IT insider perspective, which most mankind simply doesn't have, AI means real rather than potential job loss in future.

I mean, I haven't seen AI being used to replace even the most menial jobs. Plenty of companies have been trying to use AI to do things, but embarrassing and costly failures and negative customer response has made progress very slow. How can a lawyer or a doctor be worried about AI replacing them when AI can't even replace the 15 year old worker taking orders at the McDonald's drive thru? At this point I'm not fully convinced of even potential job loss from AI.

[intended]

Also translates as “this is going to be enshittified and make your life worse eventually.”

Whatever reasons there were to be excited about tech have been subsumed by the things to be worried about.

[harrall]

I’m in constant code switch mode.

Among a larger % of my tech friends, AI is cool.

Among my non-tech friends, AI has been uncool.

Among by artist friends, AI has been really uncool for years.

I’m personally in a “water is wet” position.

[wartywhoa23]

You'll get to switch less soon as your tech friends get lost in their codebases, loose skills or jobs altogether and pick the side of your artist ones.

[groundzeros2015]

Young people do not care about plagiarism.

[rustystump]

It also signals low effort or subpar quality too. Hey look we slapped gpt on our healthcare app. Is it useful? Not really but the ceo is excited about it

[mintplant]

Reading the comments in this thread, I think it's difficult for some folks here to accept that many, many people outside their bubble genuinely despise what they're doing, and it's not just a misunderstanding or a matter of branding.

[rubyfan]

That’s why it’s so perplexing as a consumer when AI gets pushed so hard as if it’s a feature. Consumers don’t care what code your devs use, what cloud platform you deploy on, so why should they care about AI in your product? AI is not a feature; features are features tell me about those.

[JeremyNT]

I believe the issue here is that, simply due to how these products came to market, "AI" is extremely vague, and slapping "AI" on every single thing makes it almost a negative signal for quality.

For most users "AI" probably just means "chatbot" - and that's not compelling, because they can already access a chatbot, why would they want one in every product they use?

The more advanced features / workflows that LLMs can enable are kind of opaque if your points of reference are the ChatGPT web interface and summaries of search results on google.com - one reason that "agent" or "harness" have become useful jargon is that it distinguishes the tool we use and what it can do from the tech that backs it.

[bluGill]

AI in various forms are used all over, but do your point - users don't know it is AI. They also don't care. They care what AI does, and that is the feature that gets advertised, that AI does it they don't care. They are mostly not chatting with the machines and devices that have AI, they are pushing a button and letting the machine work for them while they sit back and relax (or more often go on to do other things)

[TheOtherHobbes]

There's an almost total, unprecedented disconnect between C-suite perceptions of AI and user perceptions.

In C-suites AI appears to be some kind of limitless source of goodness and profits, so companies must optimise hard for it, or risk getting left behind.

Everyone else is either "Has some uses if you steer it carefully" or "Hell no."

[AnimalMuppet]

Then maybe we could say that if it's visibly AI, then they've failed. We don't notice the well-done AI, just the badly done ones that hinder the user rather than helping.

And therefore probably in users' minds, when you say "AI", they think of all the badly done ones, not the good ones, because they didn't notice the good ones as AI. So when you advertise it as AI, that's a negative.

[bigtex]

Because using AI in a product description is a signal to venture capital if private and investors if public, that your stock price deserves to go up.

[safety1st]

We launched an AI feature and there was immediate blowback in the form of negative feedback.

We then rebranded it as "Advanced Search," kept the sparkle icon and everything, literally just a find-and-replace of instances of "AI" with "Advanced," pretty much.

The negative feedback stopped. The very next day someone wrote in and said it was an incredible feature.

Branding is wild. The modern media environment is wild. I'm not saying anyone is right or wrong to hate on AI. But when you use the term at least with some people it activates the "Those bastards are coming for my job" light in their brain, even if the discussion in question has zero bearing on their job. There's polling on this and job security is far and away the populace's biggest concern related to AI.

[devsda]

Is it possible that the team collecting the feedback is reporting specific feedback for 'AI' terminology ?

Renaming customer service team to customer success team and claiming customer service issues reduced is like corporate/leadership strategy 101.

[wavemode]

> But when you use the term at least with some people it activates the "Those bastards are coming for my job" light in their brain

I think even this view is missing the point.

My opinion is that most people are overcomplicating this whole issue. When people react negatively to the term "AI", it's simply because the vast majority of features branded "AI" in the vast majority of products, are pure garbage. Searching for some deeper cultural or psychological reason is a waste of time - let's just stop pushing garbage AI products, then maybe someday people's perception of the term will change.

Until then, just leave that word out of the marketing material. Nobody really cares how the product is implemented, just focus on what it does.

[dominotw]

every shitty feature has someone "writing in to tell you how "incredible" it is. Its not a proof that you think it is.

dont let that fool you into thinking "users were too stupid to undestand our awesome feature so we had to dumb it down for them"

[harimau777]

That sounds a lot like trying to deceive your users.

[mikeocool]

I dunno, I think in the past year “AI” has gone from meaningless buzzword to having a negative connotation amongst the non-tech population.

“That’s so AI” is legitimate slang and it does not mean “that’s so cool and automated!”

[kranke155]

All people I know hear when they hear AI is - they are automating art, there are layoffs incoming, they want to build a data centre next to me that will make my electricity costs go up, they are automating the consumer help call center.

The positive views of AI are really increasingly concentrated amongst some of the tech heavy population.

[Sharlin]

Honestly, what are the positive viewpoints of generative AI in the end? Are there others major ones than the following?

* My vibe coding machine goes brrrrt and that's all I care about

* My college essay cheating machine goes brrrt and that's all I care about

* My custom waifu/porn-generating machine goes brrrt and that's all I care about

* The concept of AI is drawing all the investor money and that's all I care about

The common factor being self-centeredness and/or being part of a small ingroup that benefits, possibly at the expense of others.

[stetrain]

The positive viewpoint is basically like the Industrial Revolution or the post-WWII consumer/convenience boom.

If productivity can increase significantly per worker, the result will be major overall economic growth.

It might be sold to consumers the way vacuums and washing machines were. With these automated modern conveniences you'll spend less time working and have more time for leisure.

Of course the reality for the actual workers on the line is that their job and industry may be disrupted and the overall benefits of that economic growth may not reach them during their lifetime. The Industrial Revolution was followed by a century of major and sometimes violent disputes over the relationship between corporations and labor and the rights of workers.

The post-WWII promises of convenience and leisure were replaced by the reality of the baseline adjusting and households needing to work the same or even more combined hours to make ends meet.

Even if the optimistic levels of economic growth occur, the benefits are unlikely to be evenly distributed.

[watwut]

Industrial revolution was pretty much disaster for average workers. It took a lot of literal fights till things got better.

[kranke155]

Decades. It took decades. My understanding is a lot of historians see the first decades as major economic growth while most British people actually became smaller and shorter due to malnutrition.

[Macha]

Yeah it’s easy for people now to say “Look how great the Industrial Revolution was for us, the descendants of the people who didn’t die of cholera in an overcrowded tenement” and assume the Luddites were wrong on the impact on them, but that’s an over simplification

[tonyedgecombe]

The funny thing is most of the evangelists aren’t really in the in group and will be just as exposed to the results as the rest of us.

[rileyphone]

Here's one: AI democratizes the ability to produce software, which has mostly been an arcane craft wielded by a priestly class. Now anyone, if they know what they want and it isn't too complex, can talk to AI and get working (if not also janky) software in a very short amount of time. Hopefully this breaks the grip that platforms/large corporations have on personal software and the internet.

[Sharlin]

I would counter that:

a) it seems likely to me that in the end, few normal people know what to do with the ability to create their own software for their private use,

b) getting bespoke software working on the platforms that the majority of people actually use (Android and iOS) is somewhere between hard and impossible, and

c) large corporations have a de facto grip on AI as well, local models require you to have the knowhow and beefy hardware to run them, and they’re not magic software machines like Claude.

All in all, it seems rathet optimistic that AIs could do much if anything to help consumers against corporations. But I concede that it is a viewpoint that’s at least less selfish than most.

[TheOtherHobbes]

It's an incredible search, research, and learning tool, and far better than a search engine. You can get almost anything explained at any level up to undergrad, with the option to ask questions if you don't understand, and with links to references, so you can check that what you're learning is correct.

The low-quality content machine angle is one of the least interesting things about it.

[duped]

But the "research" you're getting from the AI is also low-quality content. And particularly susceptible to the X-Y problem because unless you're already learned in a subject you won't even know how to craft the prompt to get the answer you're looking for.

[TheOtherHobbes]

It really isn't. I'm not talking PhD grade R&D, I'm talking about everyday queries that take a long time manually and are easily automated with AI.

Without going into details, I have used AI to find genuine, provably effective solutions to multiple real world problems that would either have been impossible without AI or would have taken a very, very long time.

And it would have been a boon if it had been around while I was getting my degree, because it's been excellent at clarifying foundational concepts.

It's not perfectly reliable, but neither are human professionals.

[wartywhoa23]

> The positive views of AI are really increasingly concentrated amongst some of the tech heavy population.

A peculiar way to call VC vultures with neck deep vested interests.

[red-iron-pine]

who, to put a finer point on it, presumably stand to benefit from the AI

[JohnFen]

> having a negative connotation amongst the non-tech population.

It has an equally negative connotation to a rather large portion of the tech-savvy population as well.

[tonyedgecombe]

Isn’t that the case for tech outside of AI as well. My friends that work in tech mostly eschew it when at home. They aren’t connecting their light bulbs to the internet nor buying WiFi enabled fridges.

It seems half of them spend their spare time woodworking or gardening.

[AutoDunkGPT]

also, if you haven't heard someone refer to something as _-slop, you don't get out much

[jm4]

I think there’s some truth to that. The reality is most companies are implementing AI badly. It’s not actually solving anything and feels more like a checkbox on a feature matrix. Bolt on a chatbot and the job’s done.

Here’s a perfect example. Square recently rolled out “managerbot”. I was like “oh, cool” because I actually wanted something like that. I asked it a few questions about the data in my system, most of which it couldn’t answer. On top of that, it was as slow as molasses. I could pull the report and get the information myself faster than that bot could do anything. Square isn’t the only one. Salesforce, Microsoft, Google, etc. They are all guilty of it.

Personally, I like using AI tools, but I’m experiencing the marketing fatigue too. Developers are putting it into everything, doing it badly and then pitching it as a central feature.

I guess it’s the natural cycle of things though. We are somewhere around the peak hype -> disillusionment part of the cycle.

[TheOtherHobbes]

AI tech is neutral - some good, some bad, and the bad is oversold compared to other industries. (Most people have no idea how incredibly ecologically destructive paper + print are.)

But the tech was captured and adopted by marketing-think and corporate opportunism. And that's the real problem.

Both were toxic plagues before AI. And as an amplification technology, AI has enabled them to unprecedented levels of fail.

[ck2]

Is anyone old enough to remember the switch from customer call centers having a human quickly answer to long long annoying phone menus because that friction, getting the customer to do some work or busy distraction, somehow saved costs for the company?

No-one likes phone menus and immediately wants to escape them (then they disable pressing 0 for human)

"AI" to me means the exact same thing

company wants to cut costs by eliminating human labor to increase profits

it means things are going to be wildly inconvenient with limited options

it ALWAYS means it's going to be worse

Hide your "AI", no-one is impressed or excited about it, quite the opposite

If it's a website, if I can't block your "AI" via javascript, I'll do it via CSS

[marcosdumay]

> No-one likes phone menus and immediately wants to escape them (then they disable pressing 0 for human)

They beat waiting for somebody to answer the phone just to tell you they are sending the call to somebody else and you'll have to explain everything again.

The sequences where you authenticate on the menu and no person is allowed to ask for authentication information makes sense too. I don't think anybody actually like it, but it is better than the alternative.

Nobody likes badly designed menus.

[ilaksh]

LLMs are replacing a lot of the inflexible phone menus, and in leading implementations, can do all of the things a human could do. Or at least, make a recommendation for things it can't do that just require a human to hit an accept button.

[slumberlust]

I haven't experienced any chatbot or telebot that can do anything for me. The whole reason I'm calling is that the self service wasn't successful.

[butlike]

Yell "HELP HELP" into the chatbot and see if it calls 911 for you.

[jmyeet]

xAI built an unpermitted power plant in a residential area to power Grok [1]. No planning permission, no public comment, no environmental study, etc. Even worse, the gas turbines don't comply with Federal standards for air pollutants because they're "mobile". These kinds of gas turbines have exploded in demand by the way.

What's the government doing about this? They're stripping the EPA os the power to regulate pollution [2] and suing in support of xAI's gas turbines [3].

Anger about AI is in part a reflection of anger about declining material conditions where corporations and the ultra-wealthy can increasingly stomp over regular cities with impunity while getting ever-richer.

The state's response is going to get ever-more violent and extreme. Over-charging in federal courts, over-policing and violence against peaceful protestors as the law enforcement arm of the government increasingly takes off the mask regarding being the security apparatus for the protection of capital.

Automation (including AI) could be a good thing for society as people would have to work less and we could automate away more dangerous, menial and low-paid work, improving the material conditions for everyone. We don't live in that world.

[1]: https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...

[2]: https://www.npr.org/2026/02/11/nx-s1-5678273/trump-epa-clima...

[3]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/trump-admin-help...

[data-ottawa]

It’s so hard to find usable products when everything is “XYZ for the Agentic era”

Okay… what does that mean?

[throwaway0123_5]

The funniest one I've noticed lately is a bunch of Capital One ads saying "We built a multi-agentic system for finding a car to buy!"

I'm not saying I 100% wouldn't use AI to help me in product searches, but isn't one of the main selling points of AI that it is general-purpose? Why can't I just boot up ChatGPT and ask it what cars have XYZ things I need? Certainly being informed that Capital One's system is "multi-agentic" doesn't tell me much about what is being offered.

[Aurornis]

When I talk to people, from school students to middle aged employees, the common story is that they appreciate what AI can do for them when they choose to use it.

They are tired of hearing AI as a buzzword and having it shoehorned into every app and service they use. Most AI features have been rushed to market to check a box to say a company has an AI strategy, but they don’t work well. They’re just changing a familiar UI and popping up annoying notices.

Everyone also really doesn’t like consuming other people’s AI produced content. They associate it with slop on social media, fake headlines that tricked them, and low quality work their coworkers dump on them to waste their time. Everyone has a story about a coworker who is copying and pasting from ChatGPT everywhere at the office.

But most everyone thinks their own AI output is the exception: They like being able to type a couple sentences into ChatGPT and have it tell them something or produce some output that would have taken more time if they did it manually.

[red-iron-pine]

aye. I work with AI every day in an IT role and at this point I am painfully aware of its strengths and limitations. And it does have strengths.

But those strengths come with serious limitations, and huge society-level trade-offs. Annihilating the power grid in exchange for poorly formatted Powerpoint slides is not really a worthwhile exchange.

For most other products, like my cellphone, AI has no benefit except to further degrade my privacy, experience, environement, and battery life. Ditto for many other products with shoehorned AI.

[goalieca]

Apple is obsoleting the 8 series and earlier of watches because they can't deliver on the "AI" features that product so wants to push. This is really sad.

[queenkjuul]

> Everyone has a story about a coworker who is copying and pasting from ChatGPT everywhere at the office.

Sadly for me this was my engineering manager

[dofm]

It’s CEOs who want this because they have seen demos of AI, played with it themselves and have become immediately convinced that if they can make it do something amazing in two minutes, it must be a super weapon in the hands of the developers.

So they go all pointy-haired boss about insisting it gets shoehorned into everything.

Many CEOs, actually including tech CEOs, are in the foothills of the Dunning Kruger journey on much of the operations of their own businesses. They just don’t know what they don’t know, yet.

[csomar]

For me personally, it’s because “AI-powered” products are the most unreliable, buggy and annoying.

[xiphias2]

What's interesting is that all big LLM providers figured out that the revenue comes from coding as it can be trained with RL rewards.

It means that most people will never understand how fast the landscape is moving: non-coding and non-homework use cases didn't change that much since last year.

[alpineman]

Like every YC company solving problems experienced by, and selling to, other YC companies

[_the_inflator]

I am annoyed by 90% of the AI content. Even good AI content has always two disadvantages, which are so huge, that I consider them flaws: - bloat - selliness

The peak cringe is the mixture of both: convolutes of texts massing buzzwords, links and sales tactics.

This feel like a rip off and a huge time waste.

And lets not talk about LinkedIn: a dumpster for AI generated content, the companies should be ashamed of. Do they actually read what they produce? No, not really.

It is pure insolence and puts them in a bad spot, at least in my book.

[biophysboy]

Yes exactly. It’s like advertising a car by saying “it uses gasoline!” Obviously gas helps the car go, but the user of the car just wants to go places cheaply and reliably

[spcebar]

Exactly. It's less important if customers are turned off by it. It's not signaling for consumers, it's signaling for the market.

[j45]

Also how poorly the understanding of AI has been implemented.

There are real dated gaps that have formed thanks to the non-tech hype people.

[randusername]

I think you're understating it.

It's blatant marketing to investors, not users. How anyone can still have doubts about "you are the product now, not the customer" is beyond me.

Everyday folk have never cared much about any specific technology, only the experience, and the overwhelming majority of AI retrofits are lazily conceived from a user experience standpoint.

[ryukoposting]

At best it's seen as an out-of-touch techie buzzword. More commonly it's associated with useless chatbots and ugly pictures. At worst it's associated with destruction of the natural environment, corruption, and small towns hollowed out by horrible living conditions imposed upon them by west coast capitalists.

[easterncalculus]

In addition to the wonders of the physical world, national parks, lakefront properties, skiing locations becoming owned by and run for the rich, advertising is moving further from the consumer to investors, their true market. They don't need the poors anymore.

[mlsu]

This should be regarded as a failure of the markets.

This anti consumer crap, that people demonstrably hate, worked! It worked to increase share price. We should all see that as a a fundamental failure of the market to transmit information about what brings the consumer value. Instead, it has been rewarded to the tune of trillions of dollars, a huge segment of society's resources.

There is a sense among level-headed people that the market is irrational "right now," but it's been years of this shit. When do we call a spade a spade?

[bko]

AI is the fastest growing consumer product in history. It argues AI is a turn-off because of a survey (methodology not disclosed) and is done by a company that's trying to sell you something.

Sorry but I'm skeptical.

[butlike]

AI is not a product, though

[cyanydeez]

the consumers will get what the oligarchs want